Mark Souder

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I believe I heard the gentlewoman state a figure that was beyond where the amendment went. The amendment only takes 20 percent of enforcement and moves it to compliance. It leaves 80 percent of compliance dollars there at the Federal level and the State compliance dollars there, so there is nearly $200 million of the $220 million left in enforcement. It increases the compliance only $20 million. I wanted to make it clear that 80 percent of the enforcement is still there.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, as we go through this process we understand we are going to spend more money. Now, the question is, Will it be in new programs or old programs, and what will the priorities be within this? That is what we are attempting to do here. It is not a filibuster, but a genuine debate about the priorities. This amendment moves it to compliance as opposed to enforcement.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I think that is a very good point and we will look at addressing that. Our intent is not to get at compliance, but rather at the nonmandated parts of the law where we disagree with the expenditures. We will work with the minority to try to make sure compliance stays funded.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak on behalf of the amendment, which I believe the Parliamentarian has ruled in order. I am in strong support of this amendment to increase OSHA's compliance assistance program by 50 percent, $23 million over the recommended amount of $45.725 million. The increase in funding to this vital program would be offset by decreases to funding for Federal enforcement by $21 million, it has currently $127.166 million in the bill, and taking $2 million from executive administration, which has $6.586 million currently in the bill. The reason for the wording of the amendment is because it is on the same line. We had to increase the line on compliance, and then in the debate here, make clear what the amendment was intended to do. Mr. Chairman, we have heard a lot from Members on the other side of the aisle tonight about the importance of compliance and working with businesses, and I commend the chairman and the ranking member of the subcommittee for having increased, as I said earlier, the amount of dollars in compliance. But I think we need more. In fact, I think the majority of the dollars should be used for compliance efforts, and the enforcement efforts should be used for highlighting and focusing on the high-risk cases and that the first goal should be to work to protect the safety of all the workers in this country, not in bureaucratic overhead and in harassment for the many types of stories that we have heard here tonight. So I presume that there will be a lot of support for this amendment on the other side of the aisle, as well, because this is consistent with the concerns we have heard all evening. This increases the compliance sector, which they were already doing. It goes along the lines of what Mr. Dear has testified in front of our Committee on Government Reform and Oversight and has said in front of the Committee on Education and the Workforce that he wants to move more towards compliance. It increases on-site consultation programs by designated agencies. It increases conducting general outreach activities and providing technical assistance at the request of employers. It increases training and education grants. It fosters and promotes voluntary protection programs, and gives recognition and assistance to employers who establish occupational safety and health programs. It provides additional money for the OSHA Training Institute. To provide the additional funding, the amendment would reduce overhead and administrative costs in OSHA and transfer 16 percent of the funding for Federal enforcement for compliance. This does not eliminate Federal enforcement. Furthermore, it does not even touch the State category of, I think it is around $57 million in enforcement. So the bulk of the enforcement funding is there. It is just saying we need to move at a faster rate towards compliance and working with businesses and employees to avoid accidents, rather than the harassment that we have seen and illustrated. Furthermore, I believe we will see the science will change, where thus far, as we have pointed out several times tonight, funding went up 1 year, down 1 year, stayed level another year, and in fact the rate of accidents and deaths have been declining steadily. It does not appear correlated with OSHA funding. If we move the OSHA funding more, with less money, in this case we are not even reducing the money, we are just transferring it, and we should get more bang for the buck through compliance than through enforcement. So I challenge my colleagues to put their money where their mouths have been earlier this evening, because we have heard a lot of good words from the other side of the aisle about the importance of compliance. I want to point out another thing. We have had a number of interesting votes here tonight, several votes, including one last week, where we had a clear choice: to put more money into IDEA and help children, or to give the money to Federal bureaucrats. Twice the House, with the majority of the Members from the other side, voted to put more money in the bureaucrats rather than towards the children. We also had one in vocational education for education versus money for the bureaucrats coming out of Washington. That was defeated, once again with the majority of the Members on the other side of the aisle side voting against more money for vocational education and more money for IDEA. But there is also an interesting phenomenon occurring on our side. That is, fully two-thirds to three-quarters of the Republicans have been voting against the bill that is being offered to a Republican Congress. It is just the start of a bill that we are going to hear debated at least the rest of this week and probably into next week, and we are only on title I. What we have seen is that the majority of the Republican Party here, along with some from the other side, in a bipartisan effort, are disturbed about the things in this bill that affect the business community and the workers of this country. We are soon going to hear in section 2 that we are concerned about drug needles, we are concerned about parental notification, we are concerned about lack of funds for breast cancer and other things that we believe are more deserving than some of the other parts of the bill. Then we will move into the education section, where we are concerned that we are creating new programs without any hearings, instead of funding programs like IDEA, which we have already agreed in the House needs funding. Then we are going to move to the other agencies, of which there are several, that we said that when we were elected the majority we were going to change, and in fact are seeing either increases in funding or programmatic increases. This is not something that is just focused on this title, but this title has been very clear. I appreciate the opportunity that we have had to debate with the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter] and other Members of Congress.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, one question that I would like to ask of the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. Lowey] is that we are not allowed to offer any amendments vis-a-vis the Defense bill to education; is that not correct? The distinguished gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey] was suggesting that we could find additional money, but we do not have that option here tonight.

Mr. SOUDER. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out, and the reason I asked my parliamentary inquiry is we have heard several times tonight that this is a filibuster because we are trying to discuss tough questions, when in fact the minority and the majority, as their differences arise from time to time, will speak for ours. We have not had motions to rise, motions to adjourn, all sorts of quorum calls, or that type of filibustering tactic. We have had some disagreements in our party, and we are likely to continue to have them in the future. The question comes as to how do we debate these and air them out. The gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter] and we have had many discussions. He said, let us have a wholesome debate. We are having a wholesome debate. A lot of Members do not like these choices. They want to talk about what we did not 2 or 3 years ago, or what we are allegedly going to do to a lot of the poor working people of America. This is an increase in OSHA. This is not wiping out OSHA. We are not fighting a battle over whether we are going to eliminate OSHA, whether we are going to eliminate anything here. It is whether we are going to increase OSHA. We are not even proposing to cut OSHA, for crying out loud. The effort here is to say, what are our priorities. Reluctantly, many of us voted for the budget agreement because it was a compromise. Spending is increasing. Now, as Members of Congress, we are elected to decide where we are going to put the money and what the priorities are. There are many of us, including many of us on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, who worked to pass a new IDEA bill. Part of that was increased parent participation; it had better connections to regular curriculum, increased accountability for educational results, improved access to information, opportunity for mediation, improved teaching and learning processes, supports the unique needs of individual students where there can be flexible developmental delay categories for identifying children, all sorts of details with the IDEA bill. We worked on that for 3 years. A chief staff person of Senator Lott spent hours and hours trying to reconcile those differences. The gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] moved it through our committees. The gentlemen from California, Mr. Riggs and Mr. Cunningham, the previous year, working with the subcommittee that I am on and I, as vice chairman of that subcommittee in my first term, worked hard on IDEA. But do Members know, we have now passed a bill that requires States and local communities to do a lot in their schools to address the needs of these students. We increased their funding, but we did not increase their funding enough. I would just as soon, quite frankly, the Federal Government was not always increasing their funding, and that we had more decisions at the local level and at the State level in education. But if we are going to spend money, which we are in this bill, I can think of no better place to put it than in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. As we go through this, I do not want to hear all the time that this is just a tactic and this is just a filibuster. This is not. This is saying, OK, if I am going to go along with this bill, I would like to see where the money goes. We are not gutting OSHA; we are doing increases. For those Members concerned about the compliance section, as I have stated, the next amendment we intend to offer will move some funds around inside OSHA to make sure the compliance section gets even more funding. I compliment those Members and the chairman of the subcommittee for increasing efforts in the compliance section. When we ran for office, that is what we ran for was to change OSHA from predominantly an organization that comes in, often unannounced, often resulting, in order to intimidate businesses into trying to follow the law, picking on fairly nit-picking-type things or things that are counterproductive, rather than focusing on the grievous offenders. Nobody wants to defend anybody where there have been deaths and tragedies. Our friends are getting hurt. Our neighbors are getting hurt. Our relatives are at risk. But we need to do it in a logical way, and working with businesses in a positive way is the way we should do this. But, Mr. Chairman, they have enough money. The facts are this. We are hearing stories tonight, but the facts are this: When Congress increases OSHA funding, the rate of accidents go down. When Congress has decreased funding, the rate of accidents has gone down. When we have level funding, the rate of accidents has gone down. The rate of accidents has dropped 4 years in a row, regardless of the funding level of OSHA here in Washington. That is a fact. The stories are tragic, but the fact is the rate of accidents has been going down, and we cannot make dramatic statements based on the OSHA funding. But the truth is this amendment is really a priorities amendment. Do we want to give the money to IDEA? Mr. Chairman, $11 million here is a drop in the bucket. We will have plenty of other amendments on this bill that will expand IDEA funding in other things. For those who say this is only 11 million, yes, 11 million is 11 million, and we are going to try to get more to IDEA, too. We agree on supporting that. Mr. Chairman, let us take something where we have a consensus and we have an impact and put the money there, rather than in organizations that have been counterproductive.

Mr. SOUDER. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. SOUDER. I thank the Chair. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, can Members of Congress malign the motives of other Members?

Mr. SOUDER. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object. Mr. Chairman, my reservation, too, is I could understand we could be here forever if we do this. The gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Blunt], the sponsor of this amendment, has not had a chance to address the House tonight. He did last Friday. Therefore, I am not going to object. But, Mr. Chairman, I also do not believe that the House should be subjected to the maligning of the motives of different Members. I do not intend to try to filibuster this bill. We are trying to have a debate on amendments. We are going to extend the debate longer than some Members would like, but we are not trying to avoid final passage. Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of the Blunt amendment to increase Federal spending for vocational education programs by $11.25 million. Mr. Chairman, earlier this year the Committee on Education and the Workforce worked very hard to improve vocational education opportunities for our country's youth so that the vocational education system will provide quality vocational education for students. These improvements will ensure that our students are equipped to thrive in today's business world. We worked to streamline and modernize this system because recent trends prove that about three-fourths of America's youth do not complete a 4-year college degree. All of America's young people should receive a high quality education regardless of whether they are bound for college, military service, or directly into the work force. This is even more true today than it was a few years ago as we focus on moving people off the welfare rolls and into work environments, many of whom will not go to college. We should empower our youth by giving them the vital tools they need to be productive wage earners. We should empower adults to go back and get the education they need to supplement and advance up the work force. We should work through vocational education to look at prevention and not just harassment of businesses as in many cases we find in OSHA. In contrast, in spending dollars on OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to the tune of $336 million, we are funding an agency to issue rules that are not only silly but in some cases detrimental. Let me give an example. OSHA specifically disregarded clear evidence that their recent requirements changing brake composition would double the stopping distance for cars. Their best estimates, using bad science, indicated they might save three to five workers' lives every few years. By changing the composition of brake pads they increased stopping distance of vehicles by 20 feet. This, according to clear scientific studies by the National Safety Transportation Board, will cause at least 150 more deaths each year and thousands of unnecessary injuries. This was done despite the fact that auto accidents are still a major cause of fatalities among American workers. There is no data that asbestos brakes causes hazards to anybody but there is data that shortening the time it takes to stop a car causes deaths. Why would we as a Republican Congress increase funding for OSHA where we have no scientific evidence that it has a reduction in the number of worker accidents? When funding increases for OSHA, we actually had a decline in rate of accidents. When we decreased funding for OSHA, we had a further decline in the rate of accidents. When we kept it level, we had a decline in rate of accidents. There is no corollary to the funding for OSHA and the accident rate. Yet when we spend the money on vocational education particularly at a time when we are looking at moving so many people off of welfare and into the work force, we can see substantive returns particularly now with the reforms that we had in a bill that moved with such high numbers of support through this Congress. If we put the money in vocational education, we are likely to see some actual results, when in fact to some degree the OSHA laws have been counterproductive. Nobody is proposing here to gut OSHA. If we eliminated OSHA, there would be a danger to employees all over this country. That is not the argument here. The question is should we increase OSHA or should we increase vocational education. Some Members do not like this choice. But that is in fact what we are going to be debating over the next few days, possibly the next couple of weeks as we go through this bill. We pretty much realize that we are going to spend more money. Not a lot of us are thrilled about that but we are going to spend more money. We pretty much realize we are going to grow the size of government. We may not all agree with that but it seems to be there. Now the question is which government are we going to grow? Which parts are we going to say deserve more funding and which parts do not? That is what this debate is going to be about. Are we going to support new Federal education programs without even hearings that expand the Federal bureaucracy and control in Washington over local standards and schools? Are we going to spend more money on abortions out of Washington, even distribute abortion information, birth control information, and other things without even telling the parents? Are we going to put more money out for needles for drug users? Or are we going to put it into programs like IDEA for developmentally disabled students and handicapped students? Are we going to put more money into vocational education? If we are going to spend the money and if we are backed into a corner where we have to spend more money and grow the size of government, the question is where are we going to spend this money? That is a debate we are going to be having on these amendments. The Blunt amendment before us tonight offers a clear choice. Do we as Republicans favor, and Democrats, and there are many moderate Democrats who hear from small businesses around this country about the problems with OSHA. I know Mr. Dear has tried to make changes but we still hear those problems. There is no scientific evidence that these marginal expenditures work, so are we going to give OSHA more money or are we going to give the money to vocational education? Are we going to do illogical things like force asbestos out of brakes because somebody decided that was the thing to do regardless of scientific evidence? Or are we going to put it into actual prevention of accidents by teaching people in vocational education and putting it into educating America's workers as opposed to just harassing and costing them jobs?

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, Members do not like tough votes but that is in fact what a budget is. As we go through this appropriations process, we are going to have to make some priorities. This vote is do you want to increase spending for OSHA? Or do you want to increase spending for vocational education? It is a choice and it is a choice that I believe the preponderance of evidence goes to vocational education.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SOUDER. My question is, the gentleman attempted to explain why he felt it would come out of compliance assistance as opposed to enforcement, but in fact, now all the enforcement dollars are mandated by law. Could it not also come out of administrative overhead? Compliance assistance is only a small portion of this bill.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman would yield further, the gentleman is saying the increase in the OSHA budget this year is an increase in the compliance or training section, as opposed to the other sections?

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, there are a couple of more Members who did not realize that we were going to go to that procedure as fast. However we do that, we can either debate further tomorrow morning or have some of the debate tonight, but there is an intention to not have long debate on this necessarily, but there will be one more amendment on this title.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, if the gentlewoman will continue to yield, I believe the answer to my first question is ``no'', we cannot offer any Defense amendments. I too praise the efforts of the gentleman from Illinois for special education. At the local level, it will probably take between $1 and $2 billion to meet what we passed in our bill on IDEA. We are doing what we can on these different efforts. As far as the OSHA questions in themselves, I put forth the actual data on the rate of accidents which have been declining, regardless of what funding levels we have in Washington. As we reorient those levels and work with Mr. Dear in our oversight, appropriations, and authorizing committees, I think we can make it more effective and more preventive, but it is not proven that it needs more money.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I would like to briefly respond to the initial comments of the distinguished gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer]. Quite frankly, I am not sure, but I assume I did vote for the Contract items and some of the Republican budget votes of the first year. As I said in my opening statement tonight, and which you will hear over the next few days from many of us, it is that we agree with this basic premise. We did not come here to really increase most programs in the Federal Government; but, whether I am not one who believes that the government shutdown was the House Republicans' problem as much as it was the President's problem for vetoing the bills and we did a lousy job of working out a compromise. But regardless of how Members view that, we clearly have changed a lot from where we are coming from on this side of the aisle. Some of us would not have changed this much, but to some degree we have all changed our rhetoric. We clearly are not reducing the size of the Federal Government in this bill when we are increasing agencies that at one point we were proposing to radically transform. Vocational education in my opinion would be best handled by local and State governments. But the Federal Government has for a long time been involved in this, and helping with supplemental funding. Given a choice as to whose budget is going to increase, which is the choice we have in front of us today, whether I would increase the OSHA funding or increase the vocational education funding, I go with vocational education funding. If my choice is whether the taxpayers get to keep the money and the local communities and State communities raise funds for education and make the decisions in education, I favor that choice. But that is not the choice. I voted for the budget agreement. I understand that at times politics requires compromise even beyond where some of us would like to go. At the same time, in the context of these spending bills, we still should have a debate over which category in these spending bills should get the increase in funding and where it should go. From what I have seen sitting on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and also on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, with jurisdiction over the Education Department and the Labor Department, I realize there have been attempts to improve OSHA. I do not think they have been as successful, and by the way, I also need to point out we have passed a vocational education authorization bill since the first vote when we came here where we made a lot of changes in how vocational education works. We knocked out a lot of programs that we did not feel were effective; we improved a lot of programs. That bill is now pending in the Senate. If we can get our authorizations going with our appropriations, some of us will not necessarily oppose every spending bill that comes up in some of these categories, although I grant, up front, that we tend to favor more State and local as opposed to Federal. But now that is not our choice. Our choice tonight is whether we are going to vote for more money for OSHA, an increase this year in OSHA, or more money for vocational education. Our intent is to take it out of administrative and other areas. We are fully prepared and have an amendment to offer to make sure that the compliance funding inside OSHA gets funding, and we will transfer it from the other agencies. We have been planning that amendment for later tonight. I agree, as we work through OSHA reform, that our goal on OSHA reform was to try to have OSHA come in and identify and work with businesses on real health threats to the workers. Nobody wants an unsafe working environment. As somebody whose family has owned a small business for many years, and I have worked in the private sector for most of my life, I do not want parents at risk and kids at risk in working environments any more than anybody else. But there is no possible way to understand all the different regulations, and there are so many counterproductive regulations that the way to do it is to go in, identify and work with the businesses, most of whom do not want to have health problems for their employees either, because nothing is more expensive in today's competitive economy than losing good employees to downtime injuries, to even more serious accidents, or bad working conditions, where employees want to move to another company. It is in the business' best interest to have a safe, healthy, and pleasant working environment. We need to work with businesses to do that. We ought to focus on the grievous offenders and the large offenders. Everybody has horror stories about, we know this is happening over here and this is happening over here; that we have these crazy stories about ladders and asbestos breaks and so on that are taking tremendous amounts of time out of this agency. As we proceed, we are not proposing to abolish OSHA nor even to cut OSHA; what we are proposing is not to increase OSHA, and later we will be proposing to switch funds inside OSHA. But this particular amendment says we do not need the increase in OSHA, it should move to vocational education.